Teaching with Pat Mora: All About Pat!

Friday, April 3, 2015

All About Pat!

So who is Pat Mora?

Before teaching with Pat Mora's literature, it is important to read and discover her background. Mora's personal experience with Mexican American culture and the Spanish language make her an insider author. These experiences have a clear influence in her work. She brings authenticity to her work, making connections for students easy and accessible.

Quick Facts:

Mora was born in El Paso, Texas, USA on January 19th, 1942
Bilingual childhood home- Spanish and English
Mora was a reader even as a child- books valued in her family
Worked as a teacher, university administrator, speaker, and consultant

Pat Mora's interview featured on ReadingRockets.com makes her contagious passion and dedication clear. These short videos are an excellent tool to gain a quick snapshot of Mora prior to teaching with her text.

Watch her interviews here!

Interview with Pat Mora

My suggestion? If you're crunched for prep time, watch the second video in her interview playlist, titled "A Vein of Gold". This 2:00 minute video will get you excited to help students make these cultural discoveries and connections through Pat Mora's literature.

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Personal Response Paper

A classroom library is an unlimited exploration ticket to a world of diverse people and culture. With thought and effort, this space in the classroom can become a getaway for students, as they read and discover the world around them. As a future teacher, is it vital that I begin to think about the development of my classroom library. Exploration through multicultural text is an important step in this thought process.

Multicultural text serves two major purposes. The first is to provide students with text within which they can make strong, personal connections. Reader’s look for characters, settings, and conflict within books that is similar to what they experience. Connecting with these characters is important for young readers to develop and understanding of relationships. Readers observe characters actions and dialogue, connecting it to their own experience. Multicultural text is a strong tool in creating these experiences, as the diverse characters and settings represented help connect with a wide range of students.

The second purpose of multicultural text is to provide students with an opportunity to explore cultures with which they are unfamiliar. Providing students with text from around the world turns the classroom library into a plane ticket. Students can read and experience the culture, characters, practices, and relationships of different groups of people from the comfort of their desk char. Reading diverse, multicultural text prepares students for future encounters with cultures other than their own. They develop and understanding, appreciation, and respect for the diversity of our world.

As I explored multicultural authors for my author study blog, I looked for these aspects of multicultural literature. I wanted to study an author who provided both experiences for readers. When I came across Pat Mora and her children’s books, I knew she would be a fabulous author to study.

One of the strongest elements of Pat Mora’s text is that the majority of her children’s books are bilingual. This text feature is a strong example of how multicultural text can help support students in making personal connections to literature. Perhaps there is a student who speaks Spanish at home and is looking for a book to read in both Spanish and English. My awareness of Pat Mora’s literature would help me to help this students, perhaps introducing them to the book “Gracias ~ Thanks”. This bilingual text would allow the reader to connect to familiar cultural elements, increasing both their interest and comprehension of the text.

Pat Mora’s text also provides a great opportunity for readers to discover cultures other than their own. Mora’s book entitled “The Desert is my Mother” is a great example of how readers can converge on a familiar topic told from the point of view of an alternate culture. This book uses metaphors of the desert to describe the importance of nature to our lives. Mora uses desert imagery to compare the desert to a mother figure, highlighting all it does for human kind. A young reader could open Mora’s book to learn about how landscape impact our approach to the world. This opportunity to talk about different metaphors would be a great conversation starter in comparing and contrasting different cultures.

In an effort to communicate these benefits of multicultural literature, specifically by Pat Mora, I created a blog for educators. I wrote this blog, entitled Teaching with Pat Mora, as a reference for other teachers to access if they were interested in using Pat Mora’s text as a teaching resource. The blog has two major parts. The first is a set of four blog posts that serve as a personal introduction to Pat Mora. The posts contain a list of favorite titles, biographical information, and common book themes and ideas. It is important for those interested in teaching with Pat Mora’s work to read this section. Learning about Pat Mora’s life and major themes helps develop a strong understanding of her work as an author rather than individual titles.

The second half of the blog is dedicated to the exploration through four different children’s books. Each blog post includes a short summary of the book and multiple ideas of application in the classroom. These activities range from short, read aloud discussion points to large, group analysis projects. The text and activities span a wide range of both age and skill lever, making the blog an effective tool for teachers of all grade levels. Links within these pages of the blog bring the visitor to other sources that provide an ever larger list of Pat Mora’s text and classroom activity connections.

Reading Pat Mora’s work has contributed to my interest in using multicultural children’s literature in my future classroom. My research has opened my eyes to the influences that help shape and create multicultural text. In the future, I hope that my blog, Teaching with Pat Mora, will help both myself and future teacher in their effort to respect and highlight multicultural text in the classroom.